The ‘Myth’ of a Black Middle Class

But gee, Wally, what about the Jeffersons? What about the Cos?

Some yuppies who have pulled themselves up by the bootstraps daddy paid for may find it difficult to believe, but despite the Horatio Alger tone of the times, the black bourgeoisie is shrinking. According to a four-month investigation by Money magazine, the notion of a burgeoning black middle class is media mythology.

Twenty-five years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, blacks continue to face forms of discrimination that effectively assure many a smaller piece of the economic pie, Money states. As a result, reporter Walter L. Updegrave asserts, blacks earn 10% to 26% less than whites with similar educational backgrounds. For example, a black household with an annual income of $24,000 to $48,000 has a net worth that is one-third that of a white household with the same earnings, and black professionals and managers are twice as likely to be jobless as their white counterparts.

“Even families who have supposedly made it and earn solid middle-class incomes of $25,000 to $50,000 a year suffer gross inequalities compared with similar white families,” the cover story says.

According to Money’s statistics, the percentage of all black families earning $25,000 to $50,000 a year, adjusted for inflation, climbed as high as 30.5% in 1976 but dropped to 26.7% in 1988.

Why? Well, despite cries of reverse discrimination, “some of the most lucrative and influential fields remain closed to blacks,” Money states. Besides such straight-ahead inequality, the bigotry of times past comes back to haunt today’s blacks. Black Americans’ grandparents and parents couldn’t earn as much as their white counterparts, in spite of equal talents. “As a result,” the article says, “most middle-class whites get a head start on blacks through this intergenerational transfer of wealth.”

Discrimination also relegates many blacks to predominantly black neighborhoods, which--because racism survives--appreciate in value at a rate far below white neighborhoods. At the same time, “blacks who move to areas considered middle class are often disillusioned to see that their property doesn’t appreciate at the rate they expected,” one source for the article said. “One reason is that whites move out.”

When black families do get ahead, many find that their inexperience in investing puts them at a disadvantage yet again. Cautious with their hard-won wealth, blacks invest more conservatively and fail to diversify, and as a result “whites who start out with more hand-me-down wealth pull ever further ahead as their assets earn higher returns.”

And the bad news continues: “In 1976, when more than twice as much grant money flowed from the federal government, the percentage of black high school graduates enrolled in college exceeded that of whites--33.5% versus 33%. But federal education cuts have helped reverse that.”

But there are ways to improve things, the magazine says. The government can put more money into employment, housing and education. It can pass new laws mandating disclosure policies to prevent financial and insurance institutions from discriminating. Blacks can begin to diversify, and whites can become less bigoted.

Unless big changes are made, however, Money predicts blacks will not achieve economic equity with whites until the 22nd Century.

Magazines to Lure Kids Away From TV

Your kids will probably unwrap a magazine gift subscription with all the joyful gratitude they display upon opening the pajamas Aunt Emma sent. But that’s no reason not to give the little video zombies magazine subscriptions for Christmas.

There are more than 100 magazines specifically for children, and given their target audience, some of them are every bit as good as the best adult magazines. The problem is, even doting parents who are totally tapped into the kid-culture underground probably don’t know where to find them.

So the Education Press Assn. of America and the International Reading Assn. have published Magazines for Children, an excellent guide to children’s periodicals, from Alf Magazine to Zoobooks.

The publication is slanted toward teachers and librarians, but magazine-addicted parents also may want a copy of this excellent resource ($5.25, International Reading Assn., 800 Varksdale Road, P.O. 8139, Newark, Del. 19714-8139; or call (302) 731-1600, Ext. 75). As the introduction states, immersing a child in an environment where the family reads everything from newspapers to encyclopedias goes a long way toward making kids literate.

Magazines for Children offers convincing reasons parents and teachers should subscribe to kids’ magazines. For instance: Magazines are more current than books, they cost less, many complement the school curriculum, and they expose children to new ideas and good writing--Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott and Robert Louis Stevenson all contributed to children’s magazines in their day, and some of the finest children’s writers do now.

A new magazine in the mailbox may even offer sufficient temptation to lure kids away from Care Bears cartoons and Nintendo for a few hours.

The booklet lists magazines alphabetically, with brief descriptions of the content, target audience age, prices, and addresses for subscribing and writing to the editorial offices. It also features indexes by subject matter and age group.

Parents may be surprised to find, for example, that there are 13 science magazines, three math magazines, 10 religion magazines, four history magazines and even a kids’ film-making magazine.

In fact, the spectrum of publications is as broad as that of adult periodicals. So, parents and children will have to make choices, such as whether to subscribe to Barbie Magazine (circulation 650,000), with its emphasis on current fashion, grooming and celebrity interviews, or Skipping Stones, a “multilingual, environmentally aware magazine designed to let children from diverse backgrounds share their experiences, cultures, languages and creative expressions.”

It’s probably too late to receive the guide in time for sending Christmas subscriptions. But here are a few sure-fire recommendations:

Cricket, the Magazine for Children. This award-winning publication features top-notch stories, humor, articles and art geared to kids ages 6 to 12. (Cricket, $22.50 a year, P.O. Box 51144, Boulder, Colo. 80321, (800) 284-7257)

National Geographic World. This junior National Geographic is a chip off the old block, with stories on adventure, natural history, sports and science as well as posters, games, crafts and mazes. Geared to ages 8 to 14, it boasts a million subscribers. (National Geographic World, $10.95 a year, P.O. Box 2330, Washington, D.C. 20077)

Stone Soup, the Magazine by Children. A high-quality literary magazine published by the Children’s Art Foundation, this bimonthly features fiction, poetry, book reviews and art by children from ages 6 to 13. (Stone Soup, $20 a year, P.O. Box 83, Santa Cruz, Calif. 95063).

Sports Illustrated for Kids. This is a sports magazine for boys and girls ages 8 to 13. (Sports Illustrated for Kids, $15.95 a year, Time Inc. Magazine Co., P.O. Box 830607, Birmingham, Ala. 35283, (800) 632-1300).

Your Big Backyard. This is the National Wildlife Federation’s well-produced conservation magazine for preschoolers. It features articles and stories for parents to read to their 3- to 5-year-olds as well as puzzles and games focusing on art skills, and color and number identification. The heart of the magazine, though, is beautiful nature and wildlife photography, blown up to a size that engages the youngest eyes. Kids will presumably want to graduate to the Federation’s Ranger Rick Nature Club, which features its own magazine for children ages 6 to 12. (Your Big Backyard, $10 per year, National Wildlife Federation, 8925 Leesburg Pike, Vienna, Va. 22180. (703) 790-4000; Ranger Rick, $14 a year, same address as Your Big Backyard.)

For parents who want to browse before they buy, the Los Angeles Library System subscribes to more than half of these magazines.

A ‘Black Tempest’ and the Naming of Decade

A suicide note was the most difficult piece of writing novelist William Styron ever attempted. Luckily, composing that note helped the author pull himself back from the brink of self-destruction. He came so close to killing himself, however, that he was able to write an evocative account of his descent into the “black tempest” of depression for the December issue of Vanity Fair.

“To most of those who have experienced it,” he writes, “the horror of depression is so overwhelming as to be quite beyond expression, hence the frustrated sense of inadequacy found in the work of even the greatest artists.”

Styron rounds up sad snippets from some of the most brilliant victims of “melancholia”--Dante, Baudelaire, Emily Dickinson--and draws upon all the latest theories from science and medicine. But his own insights are the most powerful and moving. For instance, he describes the “mind storm” and the pain that made him fixate on various ways to kill himself, explaining, “. . . hideous fantasies, which cause well people to shudder, are to the deeply depressed mind what lascivious daydreams are to persons of robust sexuality.”

Styron’s article ends with a list of depression research and support organizations. But his own poetic analysis and conclusions--that the disease can be conquered and that those who overcome it will once again find light in a world that had seemed dark with “despair beyond despair”--may do more to lift the spirits of depression sufferers.

Also: While Playboy is holding a contest to name this fast-fading decade, Vanity Fair has already done so. Perhaps it’s fitting that such a media-ocre span of time receive an uninspired title: “The Media Decade.” But the magazine does have a point: “Life style replaced life. Hype hijacked art. There was a media president, a media princess, a media pope and a media Gorbachev . . .”

The title is really just a lead-in for a gallery of overwrought photos of famous poseurs by media maven Annie Liebowitz. But magazine fans will be amused by Liebowitz’s group portrait of the editors behind “the top 21 of the 2,500 magazines launched in the ‘80s.” At least a third of those publications featured--Spy, Fame, Egg, Details, Premiere, Victoria, Smart, Conde Nast Traveler, Lear’s, Elle, Child, 7 Days, Model, New York Woman, Spin, Taxi, L.A. Style, Wigwag, Sassy, European Travel and Life, and Manhattan Inc.--deserve to be around in 1990.